Re: Tegile and Nimble aren't "really" AFAs: they were hybrids like Infinidat until recently
Sorry AC, you have been ill informed, or you have chosen to pass on FUD instead of doing your research:
- Tegile is a ZFS based array (with some secret sauce) that technically is media agnostic to a certain degree meaning that they need "spindles" but they are certainly NOT an "all flash array", nor did they abandon their hybrid platform in the slightest. Oh, and they didn't "fail", they were purchased by WD
*It is rumored, that Tegile was purchased for as little as $55M. Here is what is not a rumor, employee options were worthless. Just ask any of them. Please do not confuse a sale as a successful outcome. See Nimble below. #Fail*
- Tintri is a ground up design leveraging NFS and VMware (etc) orchestration on the storage side to simplify virtual machine deployment/management. Additionally, they are also NOT an "all flash array", nor did they abandon their hybrid platform in the slightest. While lot's of indicators point to the possibility of Tintri not being long for this world, they have not "failed"….yet
*Tintri=Fat lady just started singing her first verse.*
- Nimble Storage is a ground up design that moves all performance into the compute layer, and as such is completely storage agnostic as well. Their very first product was indeed (in 2009 by the way) an "all flash array", however, due to their media agnostic nature, they pivoted to a hybrid array which was a MUCH larger addressable market. While they do indeed offer an All Flash Array, they have certainly not abandoned their hybrid array either. Oh, and if being purchased for $1.2 billion dollars is "failing", I can guarantee there a lots of folks out there that would LOVE to "fail" that way!
*Being sold for less than your IPO and 80% less than your highest market capitalization does not appear in the dictionary as definition of success. Nimble failed, first and foremost, by trying to take a product built for SMB and sell to Large Enterprise. That failure occurred October 2015 and admitted to by their leadership on their earnings calls. The creation of an AFA was simply a join the herd mentality. Without a path to profit, a sale became inevitable. By the way, Pure storage is next.*
Infinidat is a "me to" hybrid platform with large scale that wows potential customers with its 1PB marketing. Very capable storage, very large scale, but the performance is certainly NOT, nor can it ever be (unless RAM becomes MUCH less expensive) comparable to an All Flash Array.
Plain and simple, folks that can address ALL THREE requirements: Consistent Low Latency (Flash), Very Low Latency (Hybrid), and Extreme Scale (PB+) are the overall companies that will "win”.
*This is precisely what Infinidat does. We back it up with our Faster than Flash Challenge. Furthermore, AFA != consistent low latency. We see in the field time and time again, response times higher than 5ms due to garbage collection, high writes, not to mention high latency with a controller failure.*
Right now Infinidat is addressing an available segment of the market that is getting less and less viable. As folks continue to tire of having silo's of storage (one for extreme capacity, one for low latency, etc) then they will have to make a decision that will be much more challenging to address in their current iteration...and putting 1PB of flash on a datacenter floor and not charging for it until the customer needs it is going to be VERY expensive!
*Our COD model is popular with customers due to its transparency and financial flexibility. Customers know exactly how much it costs them upfront and what it costs to consume more capacity. All without the requirement to consume beyond the initial amount. To many, such a model may seem expensive, however, in the decades that persistent data storage has existed, the demand for capacity has NEVER gone down.*
Sometimes we need a magnifying glass to understand what real growth is: If I have 100 customers and next year I have 200 customers, that is a 100% growth pattern, and so on...but I am still irrelevant in the overall market until I have thousands and grow by thousands!
Should any of the above "failures" have stuck to their hybrids? The answer is "yes", and by the way...that is what ALL OF THEM has done! FUD is not, and has never been FACT!
Just my $.02